Friday, 30 August 2013

Plans for future wind farms in Britain could be in jeopardy after a United Nations legal tribunal ruled that the UK Government acted illegally by denying the public decision-making powers over their approval and the “necessary information” over their benefits or adverse effects.

The new ruling, agreed by a United Nations committee in Geneva, calls into question the legal validity of any further planning consent for all future wind-farm developments based on current policy, both onshore and offshore.

The United Nations Economic Commission Europe has declared that the UK flouted Article 7 of the Aarhus Convention, which requires full and effective public participation on all environmental issues and demands that citizens are given the right to participate in the process.

The UNECE committee has also recommended that the UK must in the future submit all plans and programmes similar in nature to the National Renewable Energy Action Plan to public participation, as required by Article 7.

The controversial decision will come as a blow for the Coalition’s wind-power policy, which is already coming under attack from campaigners who want developments stopped because of medical evidence showing that the noise from turbines is having a serious impact on public health as well as damaging the environment.

Legal experts confirm the UNECE decision is a “game-changer” for future wind-turbine developments in the UK. David Hart, QC, an environmental lawyer, said: “This ruling means that consents and permissions for further wind-farm developments in Scotland and the UK are liable to challenge on the grounds that the necessary policy preliminaries have not been complied with, and that, in effect, the public has been denied the chance to consider and contribute to the NREAP.”

Organisations representing more than 16 million members from across the UK are backing the first ever Community Energy Fortnight, highlighting the benefits of community owned energy schemes.

The Community Energy Fortnight, running until 8 September, aims to promote a co-operative approach to energy and climate change challenges by empowering communities across the UK.

The Community Energy Coalition, which includes organisations such as the Co-operative Group, Co-operatives UK, Forum for the Future, the National Trust, the Women’s Institute and the Church of England, calls for an increase in the number of communities controlling and benefiting from their own energy projects.

The Coalition has also supported a petition calling on Government to provide greater support for co-operatives and community-owned energy projects. This petition has attracted almost 60,000 signatures and will be presented to Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Davey, on 3 September.

Television presenter Michaela Strachan, who signed the petition, thinks working as a community to come up with practical ideas to save energy is the way forward.

Referring to the Community Energy Fortnight, she said: “It will engage and inspire people about the wide-ranging benefits of community energy and hopefully lead to hundreds of new community groups getting involved. I know there are many people wanting to do their bit for the environment by generating and saving energy together for the benefit of people and planet.”

Giles Bristow, Head of Energy at Forum for the Future, said: “The enthusiasm in the build-up to the Fortnight has been fantastic, and shows that there’s a real appetite for this form of energy ownership. At a time when the news is dominated by negative stories around energy-generation, it’s refreshing to see that there is a positive way forward for the future energy security of the UK that the public is willing to support.”

Google announced it decreased total carbon emissions 9% to 1.5 million tons of CO2 in 2012 in its Green Blog this week. It emitted 30 metric tons of carbon per million dollars of revenue compared to 44 tons in 2011.

The search giant achieved the emissions reduction by investing in global renewable energy projects to power its operations, including US$12 million in a 94 megawatt solar project in South Africa and a US$200 million 161 megawatt wind farm project in Texas.

Jolanka Nickerman, Google’s program manager commented on the 9% emissions decrease on the Green Blog: “For the fourth year in a row, we’re emitting less carbon per million dollars of revenue. This means that our footprint is growing more slowly than our business because we’re able to get more done with each gram of carbon we emit.”

The British-born entrepreneur behind one of the US’s most rapidly-rising solar panel companies has weighed in to the debate over Parliament’s plans to rely on nuclear power for the UK’s commercial energy needs.Andrew Birch, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, is currently chief executive of Sungevity – one of the fastest growing names in solar panel production.

Based in San Francisco, Sungevity has doubled in sized every year since it’s 2007, employing 300 people and selling 500 solar units worth $10m in the US alone last month.

The UK solar market’s annual demand has hit the GW-level for the first time, according to research data published by NPD Solarbuzz.

The news confirms the UK’s position as one of the up and coming markets in the global solar industry, marking out the UK solar sector as a GW-status end-market territory.

NPD Solarbuzz vice president Finlay Colville told PV Tech it was important to note that despite recent negative publicity around solar and other forms of renewable energy as a result of mainstream newspapers’ coverage of ‘not-in-my-back-yard’ (nimby) pressure groups, the findings demonstrate that end-market growth remains strong.

Figures published by NPD Solarbuzz show that demand for solar PV during the first quarter of 2013 stood at 520MW, dropping to 282MW for the second quarter. When added to figures of installed capacity in July and August, the total exceeds the 1GW mark.

The cumulative total of solar PV installed in the UK to date stands at over 2.7GW, with 50% residential, 22% commercial rooftops and the remaining 28% from ground-mounted PV.

The research also reveals that the ground-mount segment declined by more than a factor of two during Q2’13 compared to the previous quarter. The slowdown has been attributed to the cut to the available Renewable Obligation Certificate (ROC) rate for large-scale solar developers, which fell from 2ROCs to 1.6ROCs in April 2013. This aspect of the slowdown was widely anticipated. Colville added: “The slowdown in the ground-mount segment in Q2 was also impacted by the availability of Chinese modules coming into Europe, prior to the European Commission ruling at the start of August.”

SSE today launches its ‘Treating Customers Fairly’ statement which outlines how it will meet Ofgem’s new Standards of Conduct – the first part of the energy regulator’s Retail Market Review reforms which came into force this week.

The Standards are part of Ofgem’s drive to promote fairness, honesty and transparency in the energy sector and will require all energy suppliers to publish an annual statement setting out how they will comply with the new Standards.

SSE, which supplies energy through supply brands Southern Electric, Scottish Hydro and SWALEC welcomes the new Standards which will enable the company to set out once again how it leads the energy industry in building trust with customers.

Introduction of the Standards is good news for consumers as they are now enforceable by Ofgem, which has powers to investigate, and if appropriate, fine companies who fail to meet them.

SSE’s Director of Customer Service, Tony Keeling said: “The introduction of the Standards of Conduct is a good move by Ofgem, a good move for the industry and a good move for customers.

“But we haven’t been sitting back waiting for the regulator to tell us what to do, we have been working hard over the last two years to make our own improvements. We have led the energy industry with initiatives like the end to doorstep sales, simplification of our tariffs, our no-loss sales guarantee and a customer charter and service guarantee, whereby if we fail to meet a number of service promises we give the customer money back.

Latest figures have shown that British Gas was the most online searched for energy provider in July.

Searches for the most competitive rates on the market saw British Gas as the top utility with a 26 per cent share in visibility, while Npower came second with 22 per cent and EDF Energy third with 15 per cent.

The research, from digital marketing agency Greenlight, revealed that consumer online searches through search engine Google UK have been in steady decline since March this year, most likely due to a hot summer.

However, search volumes over the 2013 summer period from May to July amounted to 790,000, up on a lull of 655,000 recorded in the period from August to October in 2012.

Thursday, 29 August 2013

Trade association Energy UK has insisted that not all of the focus should be placed on utilities to deal with energy theft and more efforts should be focused on apprehending criminals.

The comments come as regulator Ofgem closes its consultation which proposes a new licence condition whereby electricity suppliers have to be “more proactive at detecting, investigating and preventing theft”.

An Ofgem spokesperson said: “Power theft is costing customers £200m per year or £7 per customer per year so it’s important that suppliers do more to tackle theft.

“This is why we have proposed stronger licence conditions on suppliers to detect, prevent and investigate theft as well as obligations on suppliers to work together to help assess the risk of theft at premises.”

Ofgem is to put an obligation on gas suppliers to tackle theft and be more proactive in stamping it out his year and says it wants to place a similar license condition on electricity.

However, Angela Knight, chief executive of Energy UK, argued that while suppliers had a part to play in reducing theft, the main focus should be on “catching those who bypass meters”.

“Ofgem is in danger of looking too much down the wrong end of the telescope on energy theft. Theft is theft and the main focus should be on catching those who bypass meters, particularly when they use the electricity for criminal activity like growing cannabis,” she said.

A spokesperson for Ofgem told Utility Week: “We are not saying suppliers are doing a bad job at the moment it is just that the obligation will mean that they will have to step up to make sure that they are doing more to tackle theft.”

In the international solar race, it looks like Germany might be winning. The European nation generated a stunning 5.1 tWh in July, breaking all previously-set records. Oh, and that last record? Also set by Germany. So yeah, it’s safe to say that Germany is taking solar power very, very seriously, along with other forms of alternative energy like wind (the nation set another record in January by generating 5 tWh of wind power). Good on you, Germany!

Why is this so remarkable?

Well, for one thing, it shows that Germany has seriously invested in solar infrastructure. It’s being widely adopted across the country and it has a very high per-capita penetration across the nation. In fact, Germany has the highest per-capita capacity worldwide, and it is continually growing that capacity, clearly on a mission to keep upping its renewable energy use.

Like other members of the European Union, Germany is very committed to getting away from the use of fossil fuels and into alternative energy, and the government is putting its money where its mouth is. This isn’t just good for the planet. It’s also a sound move economically speaking, because it makes these nations less dependent on sources of fossil fuel, allowing them to generate their own energy independently. As we know, dependence on potentially unstable nations for fuel supplies can become a political nightmare.

The United States, which has long touted energy independence as a key goal for national security, is lagging seriously behind on alternative energy. It ranks number 20 worldwide in terms of solar energy per-capita, illustrating that this country needs to do a lot more work to adopt solar power. Even now, it remains prohibitively expensive for many individuals, and it’s seen as the focus of “green” design rather than something universal that everyone can adopt. A national plan should include not just the installation of individual home solar units, which is a great idea, but also the construction of larger solar arrays and government participation in solar energy programs.

The British-born entrepreneur behind one of the US’s most rapidly-rising solar panel companies has weighed in to the debate over Parliament’s plans to rely on nuclear power for the UK’s commercial energy needs.Andrew Birch, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, is currently chief executive of Sungevity – one of the fastest growing names in solar panel production.

Based in San Francisco, Sungevity has doubled in sized every year since it’s 2007, employing 300 people and selling 500 solar units worth $10m in the US alone last month.

Wednesday, 28 August 2013

The British-born entrepreneur behind one of the US’s most rapidly-rising solar panel companies has weighed in to the debate over Parliament’s plans to rely on nuclear power for the UK’s commercial energy needs.Andrew Birch, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, is currently chief executive of Sungevity – one of the fastest growing names in solar panel production.

Based in San Francisco, Sungevity has doubled in sized every year since it’s 2007, employing 300 people and selling 500 solar units worth $10m in the US alone last month.

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EDF Energy admitted last night that its power stations were pumping out more carbon dioxide than in previous years as it cranked up output from its coal-fired generators.

For every gigawatt-hour of electricity produced, its power stations churned out 251.7 tonnes of CO2 in 2012, a sharp increase from the previous year’s 208.1 tonnes. It also marked a change in direction, for the worse, because the 2011 figure had been an improvement on 2010.

EDF’s total carbon footprint also increased during the period.

The performance on greenhouse gas emissions meant EDF was behind its stated target of reducing emissions by 60 per cent by 2020.

EDF admitted it had missed its targets for improving its green credentials, but said the situation would improve as it built more nuclear generating capacity. It has said it plans to build four new reactors at Hinkley point in Somerset and Sizewell in Suffolk, although the projects are behind schedule due to concerns over the investment terms. Centrica pulled out of involvement with the Hinkley Point plan after the £14bn project’s costs rocketed.

However, EDF’s sustainability report claims that it can still meet its 2020 emissions targets even without the new reactors. Extending the life of its existing nuclear plants, where safe, and a new combined cycle gas power station in West Burton, Nottinghamshire, would deliver cleaner energy, along with renewable energy generation on and offshore, it said. A Friends of the Earth spokesman, Guy Shrubsole, said the extent of the increase in emissions was “surprising” but added: “There has been an increase in use of coal in the UK and Europe because of the collapse in the coal price in the US because of shale gas discoveries.

THE Federation of Small Businesses has welcomed a decision by five of the big energy suppliers to end the practice of locking small firms into potentially costly automatic contracts.

British Gas, npower, SSE, EDF and E.ON have all agreed to abolish automatic rollover contracts to small firms.

The FSB found that more than 25 per cent of its members have been locked into the rollover contracts once their fixed-term deals had expired, which sometimes led to hefty, un-negotiated price increases.

The owner of British Gas has revealed it could return more cash to shareholders, risking controversy as customers are hit with rising bills.

The energy giant Centrica is buying back £500m of shares, and its chief executive, Sam Laidlaw, told the Sunday Telegraph it could extend the programme next year.

Centrica opted to return “surplus capital” to investors in February after pulling out of plans to build the next generation of nuclear power plants in Britain with EDF Energy, amid uncertainty over the project.

The report said Centrica had enough cash to fund a similar buyback programme again next year as investment in other UK power projects stalls and it generates earnings from North American asset purchases.

Laidlaw said: “We have got the headroom but we haven’t made any firm decisions.”

Last month, the group reported a 3.2% increase in profits in its residential energy arm to £356m as it cashed in on the freeze in the first half of the year – and also hinted at further price rises for hard-pressed customers. The supplier profited from the bitterly cold weather after raising tariffs by 6% in December.

First-half revenues from household supply of gas were up 16% to £3.7bn, compared with the same period in 2012, as Britons cranked up the thermostats. Average residential consumption by volume was up 13% for gas and 1% for electricity.

Operating profits at Centrica were up 9% from £1.45bn to £1.58bn.

Centrica said its profits would have been higher but were held back by a new duty to pay for energy efficiency measures in customers’ homes, which helped push up environmental costs 37% for the period.

It warned that the scheme, which has landed it with a £1.4bn bill, would “inevitably impact on customer bills ultimately” and that the company was facing “upward pressure on costs”.

THE Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has called on Scottish Power to end unpopular rollover contracts.

With five of the big six energy suppliers now committed to banning automatic rollover contracts for small businesses,the FSB is now calling on Scottish Power to join British Gas, npower, EDF, SSE and EON to end this “unfair” practice.

Eon will stop offering the contracts for new and existing customers from April 1 next year, with customers who fail to take another fixed tariff being moved onto the firm’s cheapest ‘evergreen’ tariff, with no exit fee.

The energy company is also extending the contract renewal window for small businesses from 60 days, so consumers can choose a new tariff up to 30 days before their existing deal comes to an end.

Ted Salmon, FSB North East regional chairman, said: “We are pleased that another energy supplier has decided to end automatic contract rollovers for small businesses and calls on Scottish Power, as the one remaining supplier not to end this practice, to do so.

“The FSB has been working with the Prime Minister’s energy group to highlight this issue and we are pleased that Eon has joined the other four suppliers and taken action as a result.

Power giant Drax’s chief executive, Dorothy Thompson, reckons burning wood for light and heat is as old as time – and it’s hardly fracking, so why all the protests?

The Drax power station in North Yorkshire is the UK’s biggest single emitter of carbon dioxide, but Thompson’s plan to turn its fuel from coal to biomass – wood-based pellets – has made environmentalists see red.

Drax is the largest coal-fired power station in Western Europe and produces about 7 per cent of UK electrical consumption – enough for six cities the size of Leeds.

But campaigners argue that it is a myth that biomass is a low-carbon process and its large-scale use for power generation is sustainable, claiming it leads to the destruction of forests.

Drax’s annual meeting was targeted in April by protesters chanting ‘Drax, Drax, what do you say? How many trees have you killed today?’and carrying ‘Drax the Destroyer!’ banners.

Thompson remains unfazed, proudly recalling the moment a few months ago when, in the Starship Enterprise-like control room of the power station, her ‘Project Phoenix’ staff flicked the switch that made one unit of the station run solely on biomass for the first time.

Rural campaigners say the push to generate green energy through giant solar farms is having an unacceptable impact on Britain’s rural landscape.

Developments like Burntstalks Solar Farm in Norfolk, which has nearly 50,000 photovoltaic panels and captures enough of the sun’s rays to power nearly 4,000 homes, are heralded as a sensible solution to the UK’s energy needs.

However, some claim the sites are yet another blot on the landscape and are ruining the countryside.

David Hook, from the Campaign to Protect Rural England, told Sky News: “I think that if policy is not changed … the industrialisation through solar farms and extra wind turbines is going to have a dramatic effect on the countryside, and a very negative effect.”

It is only two years since the UK’s first large scale sun park began generating electricity in Lincolnshire.

There are now nearly 160, mostly in rural areas, with a further 229 under construction or awaiting approval.

Mark Turner, the company’s operations director, said: “The balance we have to strike is between a solar farm that can generally only be seen by people very close up to it and usually by fleeting glimpses through hedgerows as you are driving along, versus potential wind farms or the other alternatives of non-renewables including nuclear power stations and coal-fired power stations.

Data released by one of the largest green energy companies shows wind farms producing enough electricity only to boil two to three kettles at a time.

At one stage last week, three big wind farms even took electricity out of the National Grid – to run basic power supplies on site – rather than actually supplying electricity to households.

The wind farms’ owner said that in still conditions electricty “import” can occur for a few hours until the wind picks up. Such a phenomenon is known in the industry as “parasitic consumption”.

The data reveals just how much electricity is being generated by each wind farm at a given moment.

It is published by RWE npower renewables, a subsidiary of a German energy company operating 27 wind farms across England, Scotland and Wales,

The figures show just how little electricity giant turbines produce at certain times bolstering claims by critics that wind turbines cannot be relied upon to provide a constant source of electricity.

The Telegraph examined a snapshot of RWE’s own figures on Thursday afternoon last week. One wind farm Trysglwyn, which is in Anglesey in Wales, was producing a total of 6 kilowatts (KW) – just enough to boil two kettles each with 3KW of power.

The wind farm has 14 turbines and a theoretical capacity of 5.6 megawatts (MW). In other words, the wind farm was producing just 0.001 per cent of its maximum capacity.

Little Cheyne Court wind farm, which consists of 26 turbines each of them 377ft high, was producing 129KW of electricity last Thursday afternoon.

The wind farm, which was hugely controversial when it was built at a cost of £50 million on the site of Romney Marsh in Kent, is the largest in the south east of England.

Solar power could become much cheaper thanks to a record-breaking technology partly developed by a Cardiff-based company.

IQE has been working with an American partner to produce highly efficient multi-junction solar energy cells for the concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) market.

The technology is the same as has been used to power satellites and is around three times more efficient than normal solar panels at converting sunlight into electricity.

Cells incorporating IQE-made wafers have recently been certified by America’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) as having an efficiency of 44.1%, beating the previous 44% record set last October by its California-based partner Solar Junction.

This compares to a typical 15% efficiency rating for standard silicon-based solar panels.

Besides their efficiency, multi-junction cells also have the advantage of being smaller than the silicon-based cells used in traditional photovoltaic panels.

Instead of using a large area of silicon to collect the light, the system uses cheap Perspex lenses which concentrate the light, and the panels (or modules as they are termed) are mounted on large units 60 feet across, which track the sun all day long.

The system is most likely to be of benefit in large scale solar power stations in countries where there is a lot of direct sunlight, but could eventually be used for smaller scale installations in less sunny countries.

IQE has secured a seven-year exclusive agreement to manufacture all the wafers used by Solar Junction, one of the world’s leading players in this technology.

A recent independent industry report said that the target market for CPV is expected to reach more than 5GW (gigawatts) over the next few years, with more than 750MW (megawatts) to be installed by 2015.

The IQE-Solar Junction units will initially be deployed in a number of installations under development in several southern European countries, including Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Spain and France.

Norway has awarded concessions to build eight new onshore wind farms for about 20 billion kroner ($3.3 billion) in a bid to triple the country’s capacity to more than 2 gigawatts by 2020.

Concessions given SAE Vind DA, Sarepta Energi AS and Zephyr AS would add 1.3 gigawatts of wind power, which could produce 3.7 terawatt-hours, enough to supply 185,000 households for a year, the Petroleum and Energy Ministry said in a statement today. The concessions in the Trondheim area also include a power line to be built by Statnett SF, which operates the Norwegian electricity grid.

“This is a historic day for Norway’s wind-power production,” Petroleum and Energy Minister Ola Borten Moe said in the statement. The new capacity will “represent a significant part of Norway’s renewables commitment.”

Norway aims to have 67.5 percent of its energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020, and has established a common green certificate scheme with Sweden under which the two Nordic countries plan to build additional renewable energy capacity of 26.4 TWh by the end of the decade. To be eligible for certificates, the new wind farms will need to be ready by 2020, ministry spokeswoman Lise Rist said in an e-mail.

There are natural alternatives to such technologies that are arguably “greener”. So, why aren’t we looking to make our technologies truly green?

Wind, solar … wood

Fire is probably the greatest discovery of humankind, if not the discovery that set us on the path to becoming civilised and social.

Wood still fuels the energy needs of millions in Africa, China and India. Perhaps surprisingly, it also fuels the energy needs of many thousands in Europe, Canada, the US and even Australia. Why do we in the developed word seem to have forgotten its power?

Wood fuel has numerous advantages over wind or solar. Wood can be grown right where it is needed – even along the boundaries of residential properties, around commercial enterprises or even in urban and peri-urban parks.

While it is growing, trees look good and provide a temporary home for birds and other wildlife – certainly not something that can be said for every wind farm.

Friday, 23 August 2013

Wind farm electricity output drastically fell away as a high pressure system throughout June, July and August gave the country a welcome break from months of rain.

The massive drop in energy production during the weeks of hot, windless weather has seen wind farm critics claim the strategy will see the “lights go out” in Scotland.

In total turbines produced 1,044GWh (gigawatt hours) of electricity in June, 4.7 per cent of the total 22,335MWh input from all sources into the National Grid.

In July that total dropped to just 726GWh – or 3.1 per cent, of the total.

The statistics for this month lie at 667MWh, which is 5.1 per cent of the total output.

During one week-long period at the height of the heatwave, one wind farm – Bilbster, near Wick – was generating enough to boil little more than 180 kettles, instead of the intended equivalent of 1,300.

First Minister Alex Salmond hopes renewables will eventually meet all of Scotland’s energy needs.

The Scottish Government has a goal of generating 50 per cent of the country’s electricity from renewable sources by 2015 and 100 per cent by 2020.

Anti-wind farm campaigners said the figures proved that the Scottish Government was on the wrong track.

Linda Holt, of Scotland Against Spin, said: “Wind is completely variable and completely unpredictable, which means it can only ever be an adjunct to a proper energy supply that is steady and predictable such as fossil fuels, nuclear or hydro.

New regulations to ensure energy generated from forests, crops and waste is sustainable provoked a fresh row on Thursday over biomass power, with the government plans failing to reassure the industry of future financial support.Green campaigners said the new rules would allow the use of destructive forms of biomass, which have been linked to deforestation in other countries.The biomass industry denied this, but will still face a major task to attract investment into the sector, because the government has put strict limits on how biomass plants will be supported under its new regime for the electricity market. Under the current proposals, biomass will be at a disadvantage relative to other forms of generation, because some forms of new biomass power plants will be effectively excluded from the new long-term “contracts for difference” that are the basis of the new system.That may rattle investors. The travails of the industry were highlighted in July with the shelving of plans to turn the Tilbury power station, in Essex, into a biomass-burning plant.Greg Barker, minister for energy and climate change, said biomass – now an industry worth £1bn in the UK and supporting 3,000 jobs – had “an important role” in UK energy generation. “The new criteria will provide the necessary investor certainty and ensure that the biomass is delivered in a transparent and sustainable way.”The new sustainability rules cover issues such as harvesting rates, to ensure trees can regrow, as well as ensuring wood comes from forests where the biodiversity is not harmed by the harvesting, and where the rights of indigenous people are respected. The government promised there would be no changes to the criteria before 2027, and that the operators of plants who complied with the guidelines would continue to receive subsidies under the Renewable Obligation.Dr Nina Skorupska, chief executive of the Renewable Energy Association, which represents the industry, said: “These sustainability criteria ensure that the UK can reap the benefits of biomass, safe in the knowledge that it is making a real dent in our carbon emissions and that ecologically sensitive land is being protected.”

Thursday, 22 August 2013

EDF Energy has launched a new automatic rollover contract with no exit fees for small business customers.

The power supplier said small businesses that do not contact the company at the end of their contract will now have their prices frozen for a year but will have the freedom to leave anytime without paying a penalty if they find a better deal.

Whilst British Gas, SSE and npower recently announced plans to end energy contract rollovers altogether, EDF Energy claims its new initiative “goes further” by offering its business customers the “best of both worlds”.

Richard Hughes, Director of small and medium business at EDF Energy said: “Customers who do not contact us before their contract end will be moved onto our Easy Fix tariff, which will freeze their prices for a year but comes without exit fees.

Work will begin on installing solar panels to one of the most famous addresses in the world this week, as the White House will have photovoltaic panels installed on its roof.The culmination of a three-year old promise by the President, the installation of solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue represents a commitment by the Obama administration to green energy.

The UK has completed its first Green Deal package, marking a milestone for the government’s flagship energy efficiency policy.

Government statistics released today also revealed 133 households had signed up to the Green Deal by the end of July and 286 homes are poised to embark on a Green Deal plan after obtaining a quote.

The figures showed that one Green Deal Plan went live in July, with energy efficiency measures installed in the property and loan repayment information attached to the household’s energy bill.

In another encouraging sign, the number of assessments undertaken rose to 58,124 by the end of July up from 44,479 at the end of June.

The figures are likely to be welcomed by the energy efficiency industry, as a sign that the Green Deal is now beginning to get off the ground following a slow start blamed on software and legal issues. The finance packages for homes and businesses seeking to fit approved energy efficiency have only been available since May, despite the scheme officially launching in January.

Separate figures released last week revealed that the government has so far spent more than £16m on rolling out and marketing the Green Deal. However, there businesses remain concerned that the Green Deal will fail to deliver the required carbon cuts to meet UK’s emissions reduction targets.

The UK Green Building Council has repeatedly called on the government to provide further incentives for the Green Deal, such as tying energy efficiency improvements to stamp duty or council tax breaks, or extending the existing £125m scheme that provides cashback for early adopters of the Green Deal.

Wednesday, 21 August 2013

iPhones burn through significantly more energy than a new mid-sized refrigerator, according to a new study. The average new mid-sized refrigerator uses about 322 kilowatt hours a year while your iPhone uses about 361 kilowatt hours annually. The majority of that energy isn’t used to charge your battery, it’s used to power data centers responsible for the wireless connections and data streaming that bring your device to life.

This revelation was made in ‘The Cloud Begins with Coal: Big Data, Big networks, Big Infrastructure and Big Power,’ a paper published by the technology investment advisory Digital Power Group.

The world’s communications systems use 1,500 terawatt hours – 10 per cent of global energy and as much as Germany and Japan combined, according to the paper. The usage is equal to total global electricity usage in 1985.

Just one terawatt hour is enough to power roughly 90,000 homes for an entire year.

The shale energy revolution was backed by David Cameron last week who urged the public to “get behind” fracking. Is this a boost for the utilities sector? Only if investment comes reports Mathew Beech.

Last week The Prime Minister David Cameron once again came out in support of shale gas, proclaiming it will help bring down energy prices, and that wells will be developed across the UK in a boon of domestic gas supply.

With this support from the top of British politics, it would appear that fracking would represent an essential opportunity for energy companies, although the protests this week, which led to the headquarters of fracking pioneer Cuadrilla being invaded by ardent protestors and the arrest of the former Green Party leader Caroline Lucus at the controversial shale oil exploration site at Balcombe could cause temporary reticence from potential investors.

Cuadrilla is currently the only shale exploration pioneer in the UK and temporarily suspended activity at the shale oil test site citing concerns over the safety of its staff, residents and the protesters.

However, Cuadrilla’s chief executive Francis Egan, was keen to point out that fracking does not take place at this location in West Sussex. “External groups protesting against hydraulic fracturing at Balcombe do so without any work proposal from Cuadrilla to judge”, he says.

The protestors are campaigning due to fears that fracking could cause earthquakes and pollute the water table – a claim many commentators dismiss as “myths”.

Work will begin on installing solar panels to one of the most famous addresses in the world this week, as the White House will have photovoltaic panels installed on its roof.The culmination of a three-year old promise by the President, the installation of solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue represents a commitment by the Obama administration to green energy.